The Procfile is your friend

Mon, 14 October 2013 19:15

Ruby on Rails

With the new Heroku Cedar stack there is a change in the way that the Heroku platform views processes. In the 'old' days of Bamboo and Aspen, you had dynos (your web processes) and workers (your background job processes). Both of these limited you in a few ways as to what you could run on the platform inside your application.

These days, the cedar stack doesn't see dyno's or workers, it just sees processes which is more inline with the Unix design philosophy that the entire stack has been designed against.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

In order to declare these processes, and scale them individually, we need to be able to tell Heroku what these processes are.

Enter the Procfile, stage left.

The Procfile is a simple YAML-esque* file which sits in the root of your application code and is pushed to your application when you deploy. This file contains a definition of every process you require in your application, and how that process should be started. An example of this would be something like this:

This example is pretty typical of a Rails application. It contains the web process for the front end, and a worker for delayed_job, a background job processor.

Note the explicit mention of $PORT. This is required because the Heroku stack will explicitly define the port that it wants your process to connect to, and publish this as an environment variable. Other environment variables are also available, so something such as the following is also perfectly valid:

web: bundle exec thin start -p $PORT -e $RACK_ENV

So, what about scaling? Well, this is simple via the Heroku command line interface:

$ heroku ps:scale web=10
$ heroku ps:scale worker+1

and so on.

By declaring each process, and giving it a name, you're able to scale them individually from each other and even turn them off altogether. You may have traditional web processes, but you may also have workers, clock processes or more. Anything goes here, it's purely up to you.

Development

In development though, your Procfile is not a wasted resource. By using the foreman gem, you're able to utilise your Procfile and use it to spin up your development environment in the exact same way. Foreman is dead simple to use too:

Now, an interesting thing to mention here is that Heroku only auto-launches the web process in your Procfile when deploying, whereas Foreman launches everything. Therefore you could use a Procfile such as this:

On Heroku, this will only auto-launch the Rails process, and require you to scale the worker processes. However, with Foreman, it will also launch Redis for you should your application require it.

Apps without an user interface

Where it gets really interesting is when you consider that you might not even want a web process at all. For instance, you might need a Resque worker running somewhere processing incoming jobs and spitting out results to another output (file or API etc). This is a valid example of this:

worker: QUEUE=* bundle exec rake resque:work

as are these:

redis: echo "port $PORT" | bin/redis-server -

or

pg: bin/postmaster -p $PORT

So, as you can see, the Procfile is a very powerful thing, and something that provides you with an immense amount of control over what your applications are doing and how. It also gives you a massive amount of flexibility with how you want to scale your application and processes.